The Twelve tpt-2

by Justin Cronin

  Tim had begun to make a choking sound; his eyes flickered, fought to open, then stilled. The virals, having completed their encirclement, were surging toward the wire. Kittridge became aware of an absence of sound around them. The battle was over; the planes had broken away. Then, in the quiet, he detected, high above, the drone of a heavy aircraft. Kittridge angled his face to the sky. A C-130 transport, coming from the south. As it passed overhead an object released from its belly, its dive abruptly stalled by the puff of a parachute. The plane climbed away.

  Kittridge closed his eyes. So, the end. It would happen instantaneously, a painless departure, quicker than thought. He felt the presence of his body one last time: the taste of air in his lungs, the blood surging in his veins, the drumlike beating of his heart. The bomb was dropping toward them.

  “I’ve got you,” he said, hugging Tim fiercely; and again, over and over, so that the boy would be hearing these words. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

  The blast wave from the MOAB struck the helicopter carrying Grey and Lila broadside: a blinding sheen of light, followed by an earsplitting slap of heat and sound. As if lifted on the crest of a wave, the helicopter lurched forward, its nose pointed earthward at a forty-five-degree angle, rocketed up again and began to spin, its angular momentum accelerating like a line of skaters wheeling on an ice rink. It spun and as it spun the pilot pitched to the side, his neck broken by the force of impact with the windshield; but by this time, between the sound of the alarm—a harsh blaring—and the centrifugal force of their velocity, nobody inside the helicopter was thinking very much at all. The forces that had held them aloft were gone, and nothing else would happen until they reached the ground.

  Lawrence Grey experienced the crash itself as a severing in time: one moment he was pressed against the wall of the helicopter in its death spiral, the next he was lying in the wreckage. He felt but did not specifically recall the moment of impact; it had lodged in his body as a ringing sensation, as if he were a bell that had been struck. There was a smell of fuel, and hot insulation, and an electrical crackling sound. Something heavy and inertly soft was lying on top of him. It was Guilder. He was breathing but unconscious. The helicopter, what was left of it, lay on its side; where the roof should have been was now the door.

  “Lawrence, help me!”

  The voice came from behind him. He shoved Guilder’s body off his chest and felt his way to the rear of the helicopter. One of the benches had twisted loose, pinning Lila to the floor, crushing her at the waist. Her bare legs, the flimsy fabric of her gown—all glistened with a heavy, dark blood.

  “Help me,” she choked. Her eyes were closed, tears squeezing from the corners. “Please, God, help me. I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding.”

  He tried to pull her free by her feet, but she began to shriek in agony. There was no other way; he’d have to move the bench. Gripping it by its frame, Grey began to twist. A groan and then a pop and it broke away from the decking.

  Lila was sobbing, moaning in pain. Grey knew he shouldn’t move her, but he had no choice. Positioning the bench beneath the open door, he hoisted her to his shoulder, stepped up, and laid her gently on the roof. He followed, climbing up the opposite side. He slid down the fuselage, circled back, and reached up to receive her, easing her body down the side of the helicopter.

  “Oh, God. Please, don’t let me lose her. Don’t let me lose the baby.”

  He lowered Lila to the ground, which was strewn with rubble from the destroyed laboratory—twisted girders, concrete blasted into chunks, shards of glass. He was weeping, too. It was too late, he knew; the baby was gone. Gouts of blood, clotted with black, were spilling from between Lila’s legs, an unstoppable flow. In another moment she would follow her baby into darkness. A childhood prayer found Grey’s lips and he began to murmur, again and again, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.…”

  Save her, Grey.

  You know what to do.

  He did; he knew. The answer had been inside him all along. Since the Red Roof and Ignacio and the Home Depot and Project NOAH and long before.

  Do you see, Grey?

  He lifted his face to behold them. The virals. They were everywhere and all around, emerging from the darkness and flames: flesh of his flesh, unholy and blood-driven, encircling him like a demonic chorus. He was kneeling before them, his face streaked with tears. He felt no fear, only astonishment.

  They are yours, Grey. The ones I give to you.

  —Yes. They are mine.

  Save her. Do it.

  He needed something sharp. His hands searched the ground, lighting upon a sliver of metal, some broken shard from a world of broken, piecemeal things. Eight inches long, the edges ragged as a saw. Positioning it lengthwise across his wrist, he closed his eyes and slashed a deep gash into his flesh. The blood spurted forth, a wide, dark river, filling his palm. The blood of Grey, the Unleasher of Night, Familiar of the One Called Zero. Lila was moaning, dying. Any breath might be her last. A moment’s hesitation—some last, extinguishing human light inside him—and Grey placed his wrist against her lips, tenderly, like a mother easing her breast to the mouth of a newborn babe.

  “Drink,” he said.

  Grey never even saw it: the chunk of concrete, thirty-four pounds of solid rock, that Guilder, with all the strength he could muster, hoisted into the air above Grey’s head and then brought down upon him.

  22

  They made their way into Chicago as the sun was setting, filling the sky with a golden light. First the outer ring of suburbs, empty and still; then, rising before them like a promise, the shape of the city. The lone survivors, their lives joined by the mysterious bond of their survival: they traveled in silence, dreamers in a forgotten land, their progress marked only by the grumble of the bus’s engine, the hypnotic whoosh of asphalt beneath their wheels. Ghosts sat beside them, the people they had lost.

  As the city came into focus, Pastor Don bent forward from his seat behind Danny. Helicopters were floating over the city, buzzing among the skyscrapers like bees around a hive; high above, the contrails of aircraft cast ribbons of color against the deepening blue. A zone of safety, it seemed, but this couldn’t last. In their hearts they knew there was none.

  “Let’s pull off a minute.”

  Danny drew the bus to the side of the roadway. Pastor Don rose to address the group. The decision was upon them. Should they stop or continue? They had the bus, water, food, fuel. No one knew what lay ahead. Take a minute, Pastor Don said.

  A murmur of agreement, then a show of hands. The verdict was unanimous.

  “Okay, Danny.”

  They circled the city to the south and continued east on a rural blacktop. Night fell like a dome snapping down on the earth. By daybreak they were somewhere in Ohio. A landscape of pure anonymity; they could have been anywhere. Time had slowed to a crawl. Fields, trees, houses, mailboxes streaming by, the horizon always unreachable, rolling away. In the small towns, a semblance of life continued; people had no idea where to go, what to do. The highways, it was said, were jammed. At a mini-mart where they stopped for supplies, the cashier, glancing out the window at the bus, asked, Can I go with you? On the wall behind her head, a television screen showed a city in flames. She spoke in a hushed tone so as not to be overheard. She didn’t ask where they were going; their destination was simply away. A quick phone call and minutes later her husband and two teenage sons were standing by the bus, holding suitcases.

  Others joined them. A man in overalls walking alone on the highway with a rifle over his shoulder. An elderly couple, dressed as if for church, their car expired on the side of the road with its hood standing open, steam exhaling from its cracked radiator. A pair of cyclists, Frenchmen, who had been riding across the country when the crisis began. Whole families squeezed aboard. Many were overcome, weeping with gra
titude as they took their places. Like fish joining a school, they were absorbed into the whole. Cities were bypassed, one after the other: Columbus, Akron, Youngstown, Pittsburgh. Even the names had begun to feel historical, like cities of a lost empire. Giza. Carthage. Pompeii. Customs evolved among them, as if they were a kind of rolling town. Some questions were asked but not others. Have you heard about Salt Lake, Tulsa, St. Louis? Do they know what it is yet, have they discovered the answer? Only in motion was there safety; every stop felt fraught with peril. For a time they sang. “The Ants Go Marching,” “On Top of Spaghetti,” “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

  The landscape rose and fell, enfolding them in a green embrace: Pennsylvania, the Endless Mountains. Signs of human habitation were few and far between, the leavings of an era long passed. The battered coal towns, the forgotten hamlets with a single factory shuttered for years, red-brick smokestacks forlornly poking a blue summer sky. The air smelled strongly of pine. By now they numbered over seventy, bodies crammed into the aisles, children on laps, faces pressed to the windows. Fuel was a constant worry, yet somehow they always found more in the nick of time, their passage protected by an unseen hand.

  By the afternoon of the third day, they were approaching Philadelphia. They had traveled half the width of a continent; ahead lay the eastern seaboard, with its barricade of cities, a wall of humanity pressed to the sea. A feeling of finality had taken over. There was no place else to run. They homed in on the city along the Schuylkill River, its surface as dark and impenetrable as granite. The outer towns felt to be in hiding, houses boarded, roads empty of cars. The river widened to a broad basin; heavy trees, dappled with sunlight, draped like a curtain over the road. A sign read: CHECKPOINT 2 MILES. A brief conferral and all were agreed: they had come to the end. Their fates would find them here.

  The soldiers gave them directions. Curfew was two hours away, but already the streets were quiet, virtually without movement except for Army vehicles and a few police cars. Narrow, sun-drenched lanes, ramshackle brownstones, the infamous corners where packs of young men had once lingered; then suddenly the park appeared, an oasis of green in the heart of the city.

  They followed the signs past the barricades, masked soldiers waving them through. The park was teeming with people, as if for a concert. Tents, RVs, figures curled on the ground by their suitcases as if lodged there by a tide. When the crowds grew too thick they were forced to abandon the bus by the side of the road and continue on foot. A terminal act: to leave it behind felt disloyal, like putting down a beloved dog who could no longer walk. They moved as one, unable to let go of one another yet, to fade into a faceless collective. A long line had formed; the air was as heavy as milk. Above them, unseen, armies of insects buzzed in the darkening trees.

  “I can’t do this,” said Pastor Don. He had halted on the path, a look of sudden horror on his face.

  Wood had stopped, too. Twenty yards ahead lay a series of chutes, harshly lit by spotlights on poles; people were being patted down, giving their names. “I know what you mean.”

  “I mean, Jesus. It’s like we only just came from here.”

  The mob was streaming past. The two Frenchmen moved by with barely a glance, their meager belongings bundled under their arms. They could all feel it: something was being lost. They stepped to the side.

  “Do you think we can find gas?” Jamal asked.

  “I just know I’m not going in there,” Pastor Don said.

  They returned to the bus. Already a man was trying to jimmy the ignition. He was skinny, his face blackened with grime, his eyes roving in their sockets like he was on something. Wood seized him by the scruff of the neck and hurled him down the steps. Get the fuck out of here, he said.

  They boarded. Danny turned the key; the engine roared under them. Slowly they backed away, the crowd parting around them like waves around a ship. The air was drinking up the last of the light. They turned in a wide circle on the grass and pulled away.

  “Where to?” Danny asked.

  No one had an answer. “I don’t think it matters,” Pastor Don said.

  It didn’t. They spent the night in Valley Forge park, sleeping on the ground by the bus, then headed south, staying off the highways. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina: they kept on going. The journey had acquired its own meaning, independent of any destination. The goal was to move, to keep moving. They were together; that was all that mattered. The bus jostled beneath them on its tired springs. One by one the cities fell, the lights went out. The world was dissolving, taking its stories with it. Soon it would be gone.

  Her name was April Donadio. The child that even now had taken root inside her would be a boy, Bernard. April would give him the last name Donadio, so that he might carry a piece of each of them in name; and across the years she spoke to the boy often of his father, the kind of man he was—how brave and kind and a little sad, too, and how, though their time together was brief, he had imparted to her the greatest gift, which was the courage to go on. That’s what love is, she told the boy, what love does. I hope someday you love somebody the way that I loved him.

  But that came later. This bus of survivors, twelve in sum: they could have continued that way forever. And in a sense, they did. The green fields of summer, the abandoned, time-stilled towns, the forests thick with shadow, the bus endlessly rolling. They were like a vision, they had slipped into eternity, a zone beyond time. There and not there, a presence unseen but felt, like stars in the daytime sky.

  III. THE FIELD

  23

  It was Dee Vorhees who said she wanted to bring the children.

  Though she was not the only one. All the women, as her husband, Curtis, was soon to discover, were in on the plan. Dee’s cousin Sally, and Mace Francis, and Shar Withers and Cece Cauley and Ali Dodd and even Matty Wright—the permanently nervous, twittering Matty Wright—told their husbands the same thing. A veritable ambush, the women flanking their men from left and right with a wifely insistence that could not be refused: A few hours in the sunshine, they all said, lying in bed or washing the dishes or readying the children for school. What’s the harm? Let’s bring the children this time.

  And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t taken the girls ex-murus before, Dee reminded him, the two of them sharing a quiet moment in the kitchen after putting the girls to sleep. There was that time, she said—how long ago?—when they’d gone to Green Field for Nitia’s birthday. Little Siri just a toddler, Nitia still dragging that filthy blanket wherever she went. Those peaceful hours under the spillway, and the butterflies—did he remember? The way they seemed to float along an airborne river, their bright wings falling and pumping to rise again, and the one that, surprising them all, had alighted on Nitia’s nose. Dee said: Could you not feel God’s presence in a thing like that? The sweet, free feeling of it, the little girls laughing and laughing, the warning siren hours off, some distant future time, and the blue sky suspended like heaven itself above their heads and the four of them being ex-murus together. The Green Zone, it was true, she didn’t say it wasn’t, but they could see the perimeter from there, the watchtowers and the sentries and the fences with their curling razor wire, and who decided these things, anyway? Who decided where one zone ended and the next began? How was an outing to North Ag any different, any more dangerous, really? Cruk would be there, and Tifty as well (the name had popped out before she could stop herself, but what could you do?); there were the hardboxes if anything happened, but why would it? In the middle of a summer day? The traps had gone empty for months, not even any dopeys around. Everyone was saying so. A few hours in the sunshine, away from the gray and grime of the city. A summer picnic in the field. That was all she was asking.

  Would he do it, this one thing? For the girls? But why not just come out and say it. Would he do it for her, the wife who loved him?

  Which was how, two days later, on a sultry July morning, the temperature already rising through the eighties and headed for a hundred, Curtis Vorhees, age
thirty-two, foreman of the North Agricultural Complex, his father’s old .38 tucked into his waistband with three rounds in the cylinder (his father had shot the other three), found himself on a transport full of whole families, and not just families: children. Nitia and Siri and their cousin Carson, just turned twelve but still so slight his feet dangled three inches above the floor; Bab and Dunk Withers, the twins; the Francis girls, Rena and Jules, seated at the rear so they wouldn’t have to pay attention to the boys; little Jenny Apgar, riding on her older brother Gunnar’s lap; Dean and Amelia Wright, the two of them old enough to act bored and put out; Merry Dodd and her baby brother, Satch, and little Louis Cauley, still in a basket; Reese Cuomo and Dash Martinez and Cindy-Sue Bodine. Seventeen in all, a concentrated mass of childlike heat and noise as distinct to Vorhees’s senses as a buzzing swarm of bees. It was common for the wives to join their husbands for planting, and of course at harvesttime, when every pair of hands found work to do; but this was something new. Even as the bus cleared the gate, its old diesel engine roaring and sputtering, its tired chassis swaying under them, Curtis Vorhees felt it. A hot, dull job had suddenly become an occasion; the day possessed the hopeful spirit of a tradition being born. Why hadn’t they thought of this before, that bringing the children would remake the day into something special?